Justificativa: Both the United States and South Africa offer case
studies of setter colonial societies able to perpetuate white supremacy well
into the modern era. In this short course we will ask three broad questions:
• How was racial segregation, disfranchisement
and discrimination made compatible with modernity in South Africa and the
United States?
• How did Black people find ways to resist and
then overturn long-standing forms of the “racial state” in both South Africa
and the United States?
• How are these struggles currently carried out
through debates over memory, trauma, and reparations?
There is an enormous literature on these topics
in both historiographies, far too much to cover in a mere 16 hours. Some of it
is directly comparative, some of it is transnational (i.e., discusses actual
links between the two areas), and most of it, while confined to one nation, is
amenable to thoughtful comparative analysis. Readings in the course, however,
will draw primarily from the comparative tradition, especially since this may
help students compare the US and South Africa to their knowledge of similar
questions in Brazilian history (this approach was a great success when I taught
something similar in the USP FFLCH Summer School in 2019 and 2020). There is
also a wide array of potential topics drawn from both the U.S. and South
Africa, from dispossession and colonial settlement, to slavery, emancipation,
segregation, and so on. The short course, however, will focus primarily on
1890-present, beginning with the post-Civil War imposition of segregation in
the U.S. and the “mineral revolution” in South Africa.
- Docente: Alexander Crawford Lichtenstein
- Docente: Mary Anne Junqueira